When Lotze goes on to say (II, 191) that the measure of truth of particular parts of experience is found in asking whether, when judged by thought, they are in harmony with other parts of experience; when he goes on to say that there is no sense in trying to compare the entire world of ideas with a reality which is non-existent (excepting as it itself should become an idea), he lands where he might better have frankly commenced.[45] He saves himself from utter skepticism only by claiming that the explicit assumption of skepticism--the need of agreement of a ready-made idea as such with an extraneous ready-made material as such--is meaningless. He defines correctly the work of thought as consisting in harmonizing the various portions of experience with each other. In this case the test of thought is the harmony or unity of experience actually effected. The test of validity of thought is beyond thought, just as at the other limit thought originates out of a situation which is not dependent upon thought. Interpret this before and beyond in a historic sense, as an affair of the place occupied and rôle played by thinking as a function in experience in relation to other non-intellectual experiences of things, and then the intermediate and instrumental character of thought, its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its existence, and upon a consequent experience for its final test, becomes significant and necessary. Taken at large, apart from temporal development and control, it plunges us in the depths of a hopelessly complicated and self-revolving metaphysic. FOOTNOTES: [33] _Philosophy of Lotze_, chap. iii, "Thought and the Preliminary Process of Experience." [34] I, 38. [35] I, 13; last italics mine. [36] I, 14; italics mine. [37] See I, 16-20. On p. 22 this work is declared to be not only the first but the most indispensable of all thought's operations. [38] I, 26. [39] I, 35. [40] I, 36; see the strong statements already quoted, p. 112. What if this canon were applied in the first act of thought referred to above: the original objectification which transforms the mere state into an abiding quality or meaning? Suppose, that is, it were said that the first objectifying act cannot make a substantial (or attached) quale out of a mere state of feeling; it must _find_ the distinction it makes there already! It is clear we should at once get a _regressus ad infinitum_. We here find Lotze face to face with this fundamental dilemma: thought either arbitrarily forces in its own distinctions, or else just repeats what is already there--is either falsifying or futile. This same contradiction, so far as it affects the impression, has already been discussed. See p. 114. [41] I, 31. [42] As we have already seen, the concept, the meaning as such, is always a factor or status in a reflective situation; it is always a predicate of judgment, in use in interpreting and developing the logical subject, or datum of perception.